Big Tree Publications
Private beta, version 0.9

Shrink Books

Bookkeeping built for a therapy practice, not a corporation. Client ledgers, a one-click monthly billing run, invoices and superbills that look like your letterhead, and not one byte of it on someone else's server.

Ask for a beta build How your data is handled

What it does

The month-end job, in about a minute.

A ledger for every client

Sessions, payments, fees, and the running balance, laid out the way you actually think about them. Payments allocate to the months they cover, so what a client owes for March stays attached to March.

Invoices and superbills

Real PDFs on your own letterhead, with your credential, license number, NPI, diagnosis, and CPT codes already in place. Print them, save them, or send them as a Mail draft you get to read before it goes.

Your calendar already knows

Shrink Books reads your work calendar, matches events to clients, and proposes the sessions for you to confirm. Longer appointments bill proportionally. Nothing is recorded without your review.

Payments that record themselves

The app watches a mailbox for Venmo, Zelle, and PayPal receipts, matches each one to a client, and offers it up for one-click recording. Take cards and bank transfers through Stripe if you want to, with durable payment links right in the invoice.

Autopay, with permission

Clients who opt in keep a card on file, set up through a secure Stripe link you send once. From then on the billing run, or each session if you prefer, charges it and records the payment by itself. Failures surface immediately, and future-dated sessions are never charged. Bank transfer stays available through the payment link on every invoice.

Ask Shrinky

A built-in assistant who knows how the app works and can answer questions about your own books. He is careful about boundaries: no legal, tax, or clinical advice, and he asks you to keep client names out of the chat.

A look around

Your books, without the spreadsheet.

The Shrink Books dashboard: outstanding, earned, and paid totals, client count, average fee, a monthly totals table with a bar chart, and a grid of client avatars with owed amounts.
The whole practice on one screen: what came in, what is owed, and who owes it.
The Shrink Books Billing page: a monthly billing run button, an email payment scanner, a checklist of clients who will be billed with their amounts, and a list of payments received.
The month-end run: every client, one button, each invoice made their way.
A client ledger in Shrink Books for the fictional client Anne Sample, showing sessions and payments grouped by month with running balances, plus quick forms to record a payment or a session.
A ledger that reads like you think: sessions, payments, and what August still owes.
A sample Shrink Books invoice for the fictional client Anne Sample: dated psychotherapy sessions with CPT codes, a balance summary, and a payment information block with a QR code for bank transfer or card payment.
A real invoice from the demo books. All names fictional.

Invoices clients actually understand

Dated line items with CPT codes, the month's balance math shown plainly, and your letterhead up top. If you take cards or bank transfer through Stripe, every invoice carries a QR code and a durable payment link, so paying you is one scan.

Superbills work the same way: any date range, diagnosis and license details in place, paginated cleanly for insurance.

Your records

Built for notes that must not leak.

A therapy practice keeps protected health information. That shaped the whole design: there is no cloud account behind this app, and there is no server that could be breached, subpoenaed, or sold.

  • ✓Encrypted at rest. Your books are stored as an AES-GCM encrypted file in your own home folder, with the key in your Mac's Keychain.
  • ✓No accounts, no server. There is nothing to sign up for and nowhere for your data to go.
  • ✓Thirty days of backups. Kept locally, encrypted, rotating daily.
  • ✓Two Macs, if you want. Optional sync between your own machines through your own iCloud Drive, encrypted in transit and at rest. Off by default.
  • ✓Signed and notarized by Apple. The build you download is the build that was checked.

Try the beta

Shrink Books is in a private beta with working therapists. Builds go out by hand so I can hear what breaks. Send a note and I will send you a disk image and a way to reach me when something is wrong.

Ask for a beta build

Version 0.9, macOS 15 or later. Delivered as a signed, notarized disk image.